That tingling in your left eyelid was indeed a psychosomatic reminder that Apple would announce new products today. -Apple announces new laptops, including much-rumored retina display Macbook Pro. -Magazine scans show Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 planned for Wii U. -Peter Molyneux discusses projects to
video The Pikmin games were always proof that, when presented with the right amount of colorful cheer, the most horrifically sad acts can be digested as easily as candy. The E3 demo of Pikmin 3 carries on in this tradition with a game about a helpless protagonist who’s only path off an alien planet
video When The Last of Us was announced, creative director and writer Neil Druckmann described the game as “a love story about a father-daughter-like relationship.” This particular love story takes place in the apocalyptic aftermath of a zombie outbreak that has turned the human survivors into merci
video It’s sometimes argued that the higher the difficulty the purer the experience of a game. Normal difficulty settings are like a guided tour of a game’s locations and set pieces, requiring only a transient understanding of a its central mechanics. In a presentation at E3, Epic and developer Peop
video In the 1980s videogame advocates answered criticisms with claims of improved hand-eye coordination. No one was actually playing games to become more coordinated, but the possibility of some marginal benefit was a convenient tool to defuse skeptics. When Nintendo released the first Wii Fit in 2
Another day passed without contact from alien life. However, we did receive these signs of life from the videogame realm. –Samsung partners with Gaikai for gaming in the cloud. –DOOM creator John Carmack discusses the dream of virtual reality. -Unreal Engine 4 broken down. –God of War creator David
video The juxtapositions one finds at E3 are a marvel. On the one hand you have perfectly tame things like Micrsoft’s new music streaming service, and on the other hand there is an ocean of explosions, executions, and non-sequitur dustep. Jarosh Barkdale has done a fine job capturing this bizarrenes
video Creative destruction has been an important idea in the U.S. presidential election, with Mitt Romney claiming the fecund growth that occurs after bankruptcy and mass layoffs is an essential part of the capitalism. The concept finds a surprising co-conspirator in God of War: Ascension, which wil
video The last few years have brought a bounty of new evidence about how the subconscious guides our actions. Where this leaves the concept of free will is up for debate but we are discovering large parts of our lives run by the rote guidance of the unthinking mind. ZombiU dramatizes the stress betw
video Like all games that support stealth, Dishonored can be played by silently watching other people from the shadowy wings. In playing through the E3 demo mission without killing anyone, you’ll need to trail behind guards, eavesdropping on idle conversation to learn who’s running the show, what ar
Today E3 gave the world a parting hug in the form of these headlines. –Final Fantasy Dimensions, an episodic retro-RPG, coming to iSO and Android. –Angry Birds coming to consoles. -Shigeru Miyamoto talks about potentially connecting the 3DS and WiiU. -1,000 workers riot and Foxconn’s Chengdu factory
The original Star Trek series was an unspooling yarn of multicultural adventurism that celebrated the discovery of new species and new ways of life. These discoveries sometimes left human beings in the unflattering light of savage cowboys always ready to reach for the phaser when a simple “how do yo
video Hitman: Absolution is a game about assassinating people in public spaces. The E3 demo puts players in control of Agent 47 in a bustling Chinatown quarter surrounded by hundreds of people, all potential witnesses to his crime. Paradoxically, in the moments before the violent outbreak, no one ca
With its new social features Miiverse and NintendoLand, Nintendo is confronting the challenges of monitoring and regulating the ways people communicate with each other inside its privileged magic circle. Speaking at a developer roundtable at E3, Nintendo’s Katsuya Eguichi spoke about the company’s e
XCOM: Enemy Unknown has a lot to live up to. The revival of the classic PC strategy title, which many consider the finest videogame ever made, is destined to become an extension of the hopes, dreams, and ideas of its most intense fans. At E3, I spoke with Jake Solomon, Lead Designer from Firaxis, ab
E3 trampled us underfoot today with these crushing news stories: -Microsoft puts the Zune out to pasture. -Square Enix shows its next-gen engine to rival Unreal 4. –New F-Zero game revealed inside NintendoLand. -Sony discusses the PlayStation 4. -Hideo Kojima hints at a new game series to focus on
There has always been an apocalyptic appeal to Call of Duty games, from the fire-lit night shootouts of the first game to the collapse of the Eiffel Tower in Modern Warfare 3. Seeing the edifices of modernity reduced to a smoldering aftermath answers a morbid “what if?” that we can never seem to get
video One of the key charms of Borderlands was its ability to visualize everything that was happening onscreen, from the satisfying blip of evaporating health points that appeared with every bullet strike to the colorful beacons of light that marked dropped loot after a firefight. The Borderlands 2
Shooters are so saturated in videogame culture that you can almost imagine how a whole game will play out based on a few short glances. A military shooter in a sand-swept Middle-Eastern city: this will be familiar turf for a lot of people. Spec Ops: The Line wants to unseat a lot of those predictabl
video Periodically the calls went out for Nintendo to build an actual theme park. Like Disneyland, fans craved a magical environment where Mario, Link, and Donkey Kong became incarnate creatures inhabiting the open spaces between roller coasters and gift shops. For its forthcoming Wii U console Nint
video Death is the final mystery of human existence, according to Heavy Rain creator David Cage. His newest game, Beyond, was announced at Sony’s E3 media briefing and purports to be a parable about the mysterious powers an encounter with the afterlife can leave a person with. Beyond was introduced
The E3 stampede continued, but we were able to snare these news stories from the pack: –Nintendo announces third party games for Wii U, including Mass Effect 3, Assassin’s Creed 3, Batman: Arkham City, Scribblenauts Unlimited and more. –Dead Island Riptide, a sequel to last year’s open world zombie
Peter Molyneux does not seem to be afraid of starting over again. The iconic game developer recently left his vaunted position as Creative Director for Microsoft’s Game Studio’s Europe to found a new company called 22Cans. At E3 this year, the company announced its first game, a metaphysical iOS puz
Hastening the transformation of games into platforms unto themselves, EA announced Battlefield 3 Premium, a subscription service for the first person shooter that will give customers access to five major DLC packs as well as “deeper personalization options and advanced features.” Each of the expansi
video An average person creates a “data ghost” of more than 2 gigabytes, the trailer for Ubisoft’s newly announced Watch Dogs tells us. A data ghost is a collection of all the logged data that can be attributed to a person, from medical records to online browsing habits. In aggregate this data can b
